By Press Release
Be honest. Do you still work hard, or are you coasting? Perhaps you’ve given up work altogether?
I don’t reckon most people work as hard as they used to, and currently, thousands are WFH, that’s Watching from Home – the World Cup. Come on, England!
Young people certainly don’t seem to work as hard as I did at their age, but that’s no surprise when as school children; they’re sent home halfway through the day. Two-thirty pm is almost lunchtime!
It’s possible I’m just a grumpy old man, who spent too much time grafting when I should have been having fun. Those people who do bother going into work, have their heads buried in their phones all day; they’re a constant distraction and irritation for employers. Bosses didn’t use to allow private phone calls, and repeatedly popping to the nearest phone box would have earned you the sack. Everyone seems to want a ‘work-life balance,’ now, not just wages.
Aged 13-14, my generation started grafting with an after-school job, and by the time, we were 25, had cars, homes and kids. Baby boomers expected our working lives to end at 60-65, with sudden death occurring shortly after. Sadly, my Grandad had a heart attack and passed away aged just 60. At the same age, I’m still enjoying work – although I don’t always spring out of bed at 6am on cold winter mornings. I like to be useful, and when I get home, I do more work, weekends too.
To avoid disaster, the government panicked over Covid and gave away tons of money in grants, furlough and business loans. Now they want it all back again, and we have a recession to overcome. It won’t be easy; we’re already paying 22 per cent more for food than we did in January. And 75 per cent of us are reliving our childhood, going to bed in unheated houses. We wake up cold too, but that boiler will have to go on eventually.
The British work-force has shrunk in recent years, so if you retired early, you should consider going back; your country needs you. In the past, we’ve discussed unaffordable public-sector pensions. Our grandparents often worked until they dropped but, on average, men now live until they’re 81, women a bit longer. You can’t just retire at 55 and expect to be paid enough money to last you another 26 years. If you’re a graduate, that could be as long as you worked. That can’t be fair on younger taxpayers, who already pay more than we did for housing, food and energy.
Elon Musk just bought Twitter and told his workforce to work harder or leave. He only asked them to do a 40-hour week, but it made half of them so cross, they left in disgust! It remains to be seen if he can function without them, but ‘woke’ users of the gobby platform are aghast, so I think he’s on to something.
With the global economy in bad shape, to avoid economic catastrophe, all of us must work harder. In Britain, an amazing 2 1/2 million people of working age are on long-term sick, up from 2 million in 2019. Such large-scale economic inactivity is bad news. Not only do they need monthly welfare payments, but they also don’t pay any income tax either. Of course, most will have acute medical conditions, but mental health and stress are given as the cause of much of this extended inactivity. I know it’s entirely possible that all 2 1/2 million are genuinely ill and incapable, but is it possible that, perhaps, just a few are less willing to put in a shift than they were? For the good of the nation, we must find a way to get them going again.
